Caterina Sforza: the Shifting Representation of a Woman Ruler in Early Modern Italy Di Joyce De Vries

© LO SGUARDO - RIVISTA DI FILOSOFIA - ISSN: 2036-6558 N. 13, 2013 (III) - GLI STRUMENTI DEL POTERE. DAL PRINCIPE All’ARCHEOLOGO Articoli/7 Caterina Sforza: the shifting representation of a woman ruler in early Modern Italy di Joyce De Vries Articolo sottoposto a peer review. Ricevuto il 12/09/13. Accettato il 01/10/13 Caterina Sforza’s fame as ruler of the small territories of Imola and Forlì in the late fifteenth-century has persisted over the centuries. Yet her fame has shifted and changed with the Niccolò Machiavelli’s comments on her life greatly affected her reputation. Her powerful Medici descendants further tempered her legend without diminishing her fame. The various levels of archival traces for Sforza’s life and legend present a remarkable example of how accretions of information and interpretation become history. *** Caterina Sforza’s fame as ruler of the small territories of Imola and Forlì in the late fifteenth-century has persisted over the centuries, with good reason. Despite her gender, Sforza successfully ruled these small but vital territories in northern Italy for a dozen years, marking her as an unusual, if not exceptional character. The fascinating connections between her public and private life, which included several marriages to prominent Italian men, many children, and several assassinations and conspiracies, added to her fame among her contemporaries and those that followed. Most notoriously, Sforza’s reputation was bolstered by Niccolò Machiavelli, who reported that she bared her genitalia during a stand-off over the rule of Forlì. Yet Sforza’s fame has shifted and changed with the times. What we know about the past, and certainly about early modern women in power, is informed by the relatively scant records and materials left behind for scholarly exhumation. Choices made across the centuries, about what to preserve and how to prioritize and analyze these remnants, leave significant, if often unacknowledged, trails in biographies and other accounts. The accretions of information and interpretation layered into the archives reappear in writings and scholarship in ways that can overshadow the original documents and color our view of the past. Sforza’s reign and its archival traces, along with the literary and archival accounts added in the decades after her death in 1509, present a remarkable example of this process and underscores the way legend blurs into history. 165 © LO SGUARDO - RIVISTA DI FILOSOFIA - ISSN: 2036-6558 N. 13, 2013 (III) - GLI STRUMENTI DEL POTERE. DAL PRINCIPE All’ARCHEOLOGO Any number of biases work to obscure women rulers’ achievements in the historical record. Beginning with the prescriptive literature of the early modern era and continuing well into more modern times, writers and scholars condemned, dismissed, or ignored these women, or promoted versions of their life that either emphasized more “traditional” feminine roles or played up their exceptional, almost abberant masculine qualities. For instance, the significant literature on the “monstrous regiment of women,” which began in the sixteenth century, chastises women rulers as threats to the patriarchical social order; at the same time, its popularity calls attention to the growing reality of women in power. Despite this backlash, some female rulers, including Caterina Sforza (1462/63—1509), have never been far from historical consciousness. The long monarchies of Elizabeth I in England and Isabella of Castile are likewise hard to ignore. Examples on the Italian peninsula are not quite as august as those beyond the Alps; Italy was broken smaller city-states and principalities, and so queens of vast lands were rare and virtually non- existent in the early modern era. Yet Sharon Jansen, in her review of the many women rulers in early modern Europe, heralds Sforza as the “mother” of other Italian women in power1. Indeed, with the rise of women’s and gender studies, scholars have uncovered numerous examples of powerful women in early modern Italy. Many noble women served as regents, most often for short, temporary terms, while some maintained longer regencies or were outright rulers or governors. Recent archival work has similarly revealed instances of women who took on leadership or entrepreneurial roles in other arenas, such as in spiritual or business endeavors. Without going back to the original empirical evidence, with new questions in mind, these women’s lives would have remained obscure. Even so, our understanding of these women remains fundamentally linked to fragmented and often slanted archival records. A close look at the archival traces left first by Sforza and then by contemporary humanists and her descendants opens a window onto how she shaped her own power and how others subsequently adjusted it to serve their varying notions of women’s leadership. Sforza stands out due to her own actions and iconography and, equally important, because of how her legend was shaped through writings and images in the decades immediately after her death. She emphasized her own fame and success during her regency and challenged notions of appropriate gender roles for women in power, themes picked up by Niccolò Machiavelli, whose analysis of her actions boosted her fame and crystalized her notoriety. Later, her Medici descendants, who gained the rule of Florence and Tuscany, tempered her legend without diminishing her fame. These three layers of archival accretions—Sforza’s, Machiavelli’s, and the 1 Sharon L. Jansen, The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe, London 2002, p. 52. See also Lisa Hopkins, Women Who Would be Kings; Female Rulers of the Sixteenth Century, London 1991; Anne J. Cruz and Mihoko Suzuki, eds., The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe, Urbana and Chicago 2009. 166 © LO SGUARDO - RIVISTA DI FILOSOFIA - ISSN: 2036-6558 N. 13, 2013 (III) - GLI STRUMENTI DEL POTERE. DAL PRINCIPE All’ARCHEOLOGO Medici’s—have fundamentally shaped our knowledge of who she is and her significance in Italian history. Caterina Sforza and the Constraints on Women’s Rule Violence, courage, and audacity punctuate Caterina Sforza’s rule of the small but strategically located territories of Forlì and Imola in the Romagna region. She came to power in a stunning coup at the Rocca di Ravadlino of Forlì after the murder of her husband, a triumph that later generated a popular fable of how she lifted her skirts and exposed her genitals to shock her enemies into submission. Her rule ended after her personal defense of the same fortress failed against the onslaught of Cesare Borgia, whose siege of the Papal States had caused most of her peers to flee to safety2. Prior to her regency, Sforza had fulfilled social expectations as a noble daughter and wife: she married the man to whom her father betrothed her, then bore her husband numerous children and supported his rule. She was the daughter of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan (r. 1467–76), and his mistress Lucrezia Landriani. She grew up in the ducal court, largely under the tutelage of Galeazzo’s consort, Bona of Savoy. In 1477, Sforza married Girolamo Riario (1443—1488), nephew of Pope Sixtus IV and ruler of Imola, which he had acquired as part of the betrothal negotiations in 1473. The couple resided in Rome, where Riario was Captain General of the papal armies, until Sixtus’s death in 1484. The family then retreated to Forlì, which Riario had gained possession of in 1480. Over the years, Sforza bore Riario eight children, six of whom survived infancy, and she periodically served as regent and ruler when her husband was ill or away in battle. In an extension of these womanly duties, she then also claimed and maintained political power after her husband’s death. When Riario was violently assassinated by his political enemies in April 1488, Sforza successfully fought to become regent for her eldest son Ottaviano (1479—1533), who was too young to rule on his own3. She survived several local conspiracies and international threats against her rule of Imola and Forlì in the 1490s, and cultivated a princely lifestyle, with lavish living quarters, luxurious clothing, hunts and banquets, and more. She was deposed when Cesare Borgia (1475/76—1507) invaded the Romagna region in late 1499. Taken prisoner in early 1500, she was eventually released in July 1501. Sforza moved to Florence, where she plotted with her sons to retake 2 The most reliable and thorough biographies of Caterina Sforza’s are, in English, Ernst Brei- sach, Caterina Sforza: a Renaissance Virago, Chicago 1967 and, in Italian, Pier Desiderio Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, 3 vols., Rome 1893. For a more recent account, see Elizabeth Lev, The Tigress of Forlì: Renaissance Italy’s Most Courageous and Notorious Countess, Caterina Riario Sforza De’ Medici, Boston 2011. 3 For the assassination and the events that followed, see Joyce de Vries, Caterina Sforza and the Art of Appearances: Gender, Art, and Culture in Early Modern Italy Farnham, Surrey 2010, pp. 38-43; Breisach, pp. 96–102; Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, vol. 3, doc. 1355, vol.1, pp. 195–262. 167 © LO SGUARDO - RIVISTA DI FILOSOFIA - ISSN: 2036-6558 N. 13, 2013 (III) - GLI STRUMENTI DEL POTERE. DAL PRINCIPE All’ARCHEOLOGO the Riario territories. These efforts were unsuccessful, and she died after a long illness in 1509. She was buried in the Murate convent in Florence, where she had maintained a cell for spiritual retreat4. Sforza has often been considered as an exceptional woman because of her long rule, her political cunning, and her willingness to personally fight against her enemies. Her talents and achievements certainly stand in contrast to what late medieval and early modern prescriptive literature often says about the female character, namely that it is irrational, inconstant, unintelligent, and thus incapable of leadership5. These negative notions of character aside, women did serve as regents, most often for short periods, as Sforza did when Riario was still alive but otherwise unable to govern directly.

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